Today’s consumers—including prospective students and their parents—don’t sit back and wait for information to come to them.

Think about it: are you more likely to hang on to and browse through fistfuls of brochures and direct-mail glossies that may or may not be offering anything of interest—or are you more likely to search online for the answers to your questions and the solution to your needs?

Today’s consumers—including prospective students and their parents—don’t sit back and wait for information to come to them.

Think about it: are you more likely to hang on to and browse through fistfuls of brochures and direct-mail glossies that may or may not be offering anything of interest—or are you more likely to search online for the answers to your questions and the solution to your needs?

Inbound marketing methodology doesn’t have to be a mystery. Here’s what you need to know to get going with an inbound strategy for higher education marketing.

1. Create great content

Effective content marketing starts with great content -- and great content doesn’t feel like great advertising; it feels like the kind of thing that actually grabs your interest and distracts you from whatever it is you're supposed to be doing. We all know that the best publicity is the kind you don’t pay for -- it’s the kind you earn simply by being remarkable at what you do.

College enrollment continues to decline, and older marketing methods aren’t working as well.

College enrollment is down.

Since the spring of 2011, colleges and universities across the nation have lost over 1 million enrollments. While most of that decline has come from a reduction in students age 24 and over—who are headed back into the workforce as the economy improves—it’s also true that smaller, private colleges and universities are experiencing a decline in enrollment, finding it difficult to compete with the larger financial aid packages offered by institutions with bigger endowments.

Today’s consumers—including prospective students and their parents—don’t sit back and wait for information to come to them.

Think about it: are you more likely to hang on to and browse through fistfuls of brochures and direct-mail glossies that may or may not be offering anything of interest—or are you more likely to search online for the answers to your questions and the solution to your needs?

No inbound marketing strategy is complete without a robust social media presence. If you’re not using social media to the fullest, there’s simply no way that prospective students will see the great content you’re putting out there.

But there’s more to building a sturdy foundation in social media than setting up accounts with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and just pushing content out there. That’s not social media marketing, and it’s not going to help you attain your goals.

To successfully leverage social media as part of inbound marketing methodology, here are some of the things you’ve got to know.